Night was coming fast. Higher up lay another ridge of coral. Between it and where I stood was a small valley. You could throw a stone from one side to the other. Trees were growing there that would give me shelter from the hot land wind that had begun to blow.
In the darkness, I made my way through clumps of cactus to the bottom and spread my mat among the trees. The big drum at Mary Point had started to talk, but the rattling leaves and the shrieks that came from the caves drowned out all of the words.
The wind died during the night. The sun rose in a cloudless sky. I was amazed to find that I was surrounded by fruit trees. Long ago, it seemed, when heavy rains fell, water had collected in the meadow and made soil where birdborne seeds could grow.
I jumped to my feet and looked about at my little kingdom. I counted two coconut trees with clusters of nuts hanging from them, a banana tree with a bunch of green, finger-length bananas, and a breadfruit tree bearing six shriveled fruit. There was enough fruit to last for a month.
Against the far side of the valley, on a flat place in the coral, I found African writings, symbols of the Aminas tribe. My idea about the fruit trees being planted by nature could be wrong. Runaway slaves might have lived here years ago and planted them.
Water I had worried about. I could gather wood to build a fire to boil seawater, but I had nothing to collect the steam and let it form into water I could drink.
I needn't have worried. Organ cactus and Turk's head cactus grew everywhere on the slopes around the meadow. After the spines were cut off or burned off and the cactus split open, there was water hidden away in the pulp. You would chew it and the water would seep out. Although it tasted like cooked feathers, still it quenched your thirst.
A thought took my breath away. As I looked around at the fruit trees and the cactus, I saw that I would have enough to live on for weeks. With the fish I caught there would be more than enough.
I could not go to Mary Point, or so Konje had told me over and over, because they suffered from lack of food. If I lived on fruit and cactus and dried the fish I caught and saved it, I could go to Mary Point. I would have enough food for myself, and for someone else. I would not be a burden on the camp.
That morning I set the fish trap in a pool where the tide flowed in and out and baited it with a sea cucumber. Before noon I had more than a hundred small fish in the trap. They were the length of a finger and if you held one up to the light you could see clear through it. For a meal you had to cook three dozen of them, but they were as good as anything that came from the sea.
I spread the pot fish out on a ledge to dry and covered them with strips of cactus to keep the gulls away, as we did at Hawks Nest. Then I set the trap again, this time in a different place, at the mouth of a cave.
I went into the cave, thinking that it might be a good place to hide if anyone came looking for me.
The opening was narrow for a short distance, then it spread out into a wide room, round in shape, with straight walls. The roof was round also and barely high enough to walk under. In the center of the roof a jagged hole let in a little of the sun so that the room was streaked with moving shadows.
I heard faint sounds, like someone sighing. It was air going through the hole over my head. When the wind blew hard, the sighs could become the deafening shrieks I had heard before.
Beyond this room a passage led on, perhaps into other rooms. The sun went down while I stood there. I did not stay any longer; but it was a good place to hide if anyone came.
Drums were talking when I got back to the meadow, the big drum at Mary Point, a drum at Maho, and one at Cinnamon Bay.
The big drum still spoke about Dondo's death. But it also spoke something new. In six quick beats and three pauses and six quick beats again, using the name I was known by, it said that I had fled from Hawks Nest and had come to Mary Point.
The big drum lied to encourage other slaves to flee, yet Konje knew that I had fled, that I was hiding somewhere near Mary Point. This made my heart beat fast.
I ate half a breadfruit for supper and thought about eating a few of the fish. At dawn the trap was bulging with twice as many fish as I had taken before. The sun had not found its way through the hole in the roof. But I built a fire there anyway, for fear a fire in the meadow would be seen, and finally ate six of the fish I was saving.
I set the trap again in the same place and carried the fish to the meadow to dry in the sun. The fish I had set out the day before were gone. The gulls had not taken them. I found the tracks of an animal, a strange animal, for there were claw marks in the dust and marks that only something with a long tail could have made.
The loss upset me. It took two days to build a platform in one of the trees, as high off the ground as I could reach.
The giant lizard with a tail as long as my arm that had taken the fish, that sat watching me from a high ledge during the day, could not climb a tree. The gulls got some of the horde, but still it grew, with more than a hundred fish caught every day at the mouth of the whistling cave.
I didn't keep count of the days. But I guessed from the number of fish I had stored and the news from the big drum that more than a month had passed and it was early December.
The drum urged the slaves to flee the plantations. It talked about the day they would revolt and kill their masters. The day had not been chosen, but it was coming. It was near, the drum said.
In the morning I packed the gunpowder and wrapped the fish in leaves and in the netting I had caught them with, then in my sleeping mat. There were thousands, but they weren't heavy. A dried pot fish is as light as a feather.
The sun was up when I finished. If I started out I could be seen from any of the plantations on Francis Bay. I waited until the next morning, and at dawn, when the first fires burned on the cliff at Mary Point, I got to the beach.
I left the beach before I came to the plantation where I had met the two boys. I saw one of them again but we didn't speak. After a short walk I overtook an old woman carrying a stack of wood on her head. I would have hidden if she had not seen me first.
She greeted me with suspicion. "Where you traveling to?" she asked.
"It's so hot I forget where I am going," I said carefully.
We were near the grove of red-barked turpentine trees Konje had told me about, that marked the trail into Mary Point.
"You got the frightened look," the old woman said. "You're going to the runaway place."
I said nothing.
"Listen, my child. Take my word. Stay away from that place. They're starving. Eating rats and such. Soon they'll be eating each other. When the soldiers come, and they're coming soon, I hear, they'll find you and take you back to the plantation. You know what happens at the plantation."
She drew a finger swiftly across her throat and left me. I couldn't move until she was long out of sight.